Personally I have nothing to hide so have no problem with being searched and I would also be suspcious of anyone not wanting to be searched as I would feel they had something to hide.
I've lived in the UK. There, as here, it's virtually impossible to be innocent of all crime. Legislatures have, over the years, passed so many laws they themselves don't even know or understand them all.
Letting law enforcement search you is asking them to look for any possible violation of any law they might discover. It has next to nothing to do with whether one is "doing anything wrong", unless you subscribe to the rather silly notion that the law dictates right and wrong.
Furthermore – and this comes from an American perspective – there was once a strong notion in our country that laws should be minimal, and should exist only to provide recourse for citizens who are violated in some form or other. (This is in marked contrast to the Platonic view that the law should serve primarily as a means for the sovereign or ruling class to arbitrarily engineer society, by punishing people who fail to behave in the prescribed manner of the day.)
This is one of the reasons behind our
Fourth Amendment: to discourage arbitrary "law enforcement", and instead depend on prior evidence – which in practice could only be obtained by something like the sworn statement of an aggrieved victim (or perhaps that victim's corpse). This had the effect of making it very difficult – in principle – to enforce laws against most
mala prohibita acts. (This makes sense if you remember that many of the folks involved our revolution had illustrious careers as smugglers under British rule.)
In short, the law was supposed to be a tool for victims and a peacekeeping constabulary/sheriff; as such it was ultimately a reactive instrument. Today, our betters (smug in the knowledge that
they best know how to determine and achieve optimal outcomes) have perverted the law once again into a tool to serve proactive "law enforcement". The law is no longer a passive instrument waiting to be picked up by the genuinely aggrieved to seek some sort of restitution or justice, but is instead a self-actuating entity whose will demands enforcement, "just because".
The English common law, post-
magna carta, operated under a similar principle. Any sort of punitive legal action required the wholly-autonomous approval of (at least) one jury, who settled grievances (nearly always initiated by an aggrieved party) primarily according to their own understanding of custom. For a time, English juries rarely engaged in the practice of "law enforcement".
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